Category: IWA

Join Iowa Women’s Archives Curator Kären Mason and faculty members Omar Valerio-Jiménez and Claire Fox for a brown-bag discussion of Iowa women’s history at the opening of the newest exhibit at the UI Main Library.

“Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives” explores a theme common to many of the collections: migration. Since its founding, the Iowa Women’s Archives has gathered documents, photos, and oral histories that illuminate the lives of diverse Iowa women. Through the day-to-day work of the Archives and projects to preserve Latina, African-American, and rural women’s history, the Archives has opened up new avenues of research and laid the foundation for a more complete history of Iowa, the Midwest, and the nation.

Bring your lunch. Cookies and iced tea will be served.

The exhibition is free and open to the public during regular Main Library hours through November 30, 2012.

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Women’s Resource and Action Center with a piece of cake and a lively discussion of the early days of WRAC and the women’s liberation movement in Iowa City. Panelists will include Sondra Smith, Gayle Sand, Sandy Pickup, Jill Jack, with Laurie Haag moderating.

Friday, March 23, 20124:00-6:00 p.m.Iowa Women’s Archives3rd floor, Main Library, University of Iowa

We will close women’s history month on Friday, March 25th with “In Memoriam: The Triangle Factory Fire 100th Anniversary,” an event to commemorate the 146 young, immigrant garment workers who lost their lives in this tragedy.

Award-winning filmmaker Marlene Booth will present a talk entitled “Tell Me a Story: Making and Learning From Documentary Films” on Tuesday, March 22nd. Born and raised in Des Moines, Booth looks back – with clips from her films – on 35 years of filmmaking as a woman, a feminist, and a dyed-in-the-wool Hawkeye.

Booth, a lecturer in film at the University of Hawaii, has worked in film since 1975, both as an independent and for public television station WGBH-TV in Boston. She has produced and directed several major documentary films screened on PBS, at national and international film festivals, and in classrooms nationwide. Her most recent film, Pidgin: the voice of Hawaii (2009), examines the language spoken by over half of Hawai’i’s people, and confronts issues of language and identity, and who gets to decide what language we speak.

Booth’s 1999 film “Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa” (1999) explores her Iowa-Jewish roots and uses home movies, period photos, her high school reunion, and interviews, to examine the process of negotiating identity, as an American, a Jew, and a woman. “Yidl in the Middle” will be screened at Hillel (122 E. Market St.) on Wednesday, March 23rd at 7:00 p.m., followed by a question and answer with the director.

The University of Iowa Alumni Association’s Lifelong Learning Program is hosting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Iowa Women’s Archives in the UI Main Library starting at 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4. Registration is required.

Archives curator Kären Mason will give the tour, where participants will examine photos, diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and other items. Mason will discuss the archives’ founders and its development over the past 18 years.
The Iowa Women’s Archives holds more than 1,100 manuscript collections that chronicle the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities. These personal papers and organizational records date from the 19th Century to the present. Together with oral histories, they document the activities of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders.

This program, co-hosted by the UI Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, begins at 5 p.m. in Room 2032 (on the second floor, south side) of the Main Library and move up to the third floor at 6 p.m. for the tour.

Cost for the event is $5 and is open to UI Alumni Association and Osher Institute members and their guests. RSVP by Thursday, Oct. 28 at www.iowalum.com/lifelonglearning/. For more information, email alumni-learning@uiowa.edu or call 1-800-IOWALUM.

August 26, 1920 marks the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. But the campaign for women’s suffrage began long before that and the story of Iowa women reflects the stories of women across the country.

As we celebrate 90 years of equal suffrage, the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA) is undertaking a project to make these valuable and unique items of local and state history available online. IWA has received a grant from the State Historical Society, Inc. to digitize important documents pertaining to the women’s suffrage movement in Iowa and create a resource page linking Iowa suffrage materials across the state.

OutHistory.org, the award-winning website on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer U.S. history, announced the winners of its “Since Stonewall Local Histories Contest,” 41 years after the start of the rebellion that marks the beginning of the modern movement for LGBTQ rights and liberation.

“LGBT Life in Iowa City, Iowa: 1967-2010” online exhibit curated by University Archivist David McCartney and Iowa Women’s Archives Curator Karen Mason earned an honorable mention in the competition. The exhibit is a timeline featuring over 70 images chronicling the history of the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender communities in Iowa City. Content was drawn from collections in the Iowa Women’s Archives, the University Archives, and from the personal collections of several members of the community, who contributed their time to the UI Libraries’ effort.

The contest—the first of its kind—invited people from across the country to create exhibits on OutHistory.org about the history of LGBTQ life in their village, town, city, county, or state since the Stonewall riots, 40 years ago. The contest also offered five cash prizes, from $5,000 to $1,000, to the creators of the top five exhibits. The awards were provided by the Arcus Foundation, which funded OutHistory.org for four years.

OutHistory.org received over thirty exciting exhibits about LGBTQ history. One of the contest’s major goals was to draw attention to LGBTQ history in places that scholars have overlooked. Exhibits include entries about states such as Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Virginia, among others.

The “Since Stonewall” exhibits are all geographically-based, but range dramatically in subject, from one New Yorker’s memoirs, to a history of the Gay Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C., an account of a long-lived gay bar in Michigan called The Flame, and a timeline of The Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund in Seattle. All the entries are listed on the site.

Professors and historians of homosexuality John D’Emilio and Leisa Meyer served as judges of the contest.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, the University’s Council on the Status of Women, History of Medicine Society and Iowa Women’s Archives will sponsor a reception and a public lecture by University of Iowa History Professor Paula Michaels.

Wednesday, March 10
4:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Iowa Women’s Archives on the third floor of the Main Library.

The festivities will begin at 4:30 p.m. with a reception featuring light refreshments. At 5:15 p.m., Theatre Arts graduate student Janet Schlapkohl will entertain with “There’s This Thing Called Lamaze,” a brief monologue and song about natural childbirth in the 1970s.

At 5:30 p.m., Professor Michaels will begin her lecture, “Comrades in the Labor Room: The International Story of the Lamaze Method, 1950-1980,” which reveals the origins of the Lamaze method in the Soviet Union, its promotion by the French Communist Party, and the deliberate efforts to obscure these leftist ties that made Lamaze palatable to U.S. women during the Cold War era.

Please join us for any or all of these activities.

For more information, contact Sharon Lake, Chair of Herstory Committee; Kären Mason, Iowa Women’s Archives, at 319-335-5068; or Ed Holtum, History of Medicine Society, at 319-335-9154.

To celebrate women’s history month and to unveil a new digital collection of UI alumna Eve Drewelowe, the UI Libraries will host a reception from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, in the North Exhibition Hall of the Main Library.

Joni Kinsey, Curator of the Drewelowe art collection, will speak briefly on the artist’s work and the significance of the collection.